Hi Christine,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were benevolence, self-direction, and universalism.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was .
You said your top three talents were NA, NA, and NA.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a pretty good idea about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to better self care .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said draw something! .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said feel happy :) .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said executive dysfunction 😀 .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: when i sit down to study, i will draw for at least 15 minutes .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in music .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt engaged when receiving critical feedback, and engaged when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being myself .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .
In one word, you said it made you feel happy .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
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| how to be better at setting goals and aligning them with my daily life |
| set implementation intentions!! |
| deliberate practice drives improvement |
| feedback can be beneficial, it matters how we present it |
| habits and systems are crucial to success! |
| mentors are important and can influence our lives significantly—seek them out |
| embrace giving and five minute favors |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
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| Albena Ruseva |
| Christine always made me feel welcome and comfortable to share my opinions and thoughts. Despite life’s challenges, Christine was always in a great mood, which was uplifting for everyone else in the team. She is an extremely open person and is always willing to share her perspective. She was so supportive as well and I am glad to have had her as a teammate. I have a feeling that she would make a great friend!
Christine’s visuals were out of this world. I truly appreciated how diverse the animations she showed were. What stood out even more, however, was the fact that she implemented her interests into an actual art fair event. I plan to stop by when the time comes! Talk about paying it forward. Despite not fully understanding everything in Christine’s presentation, I truly appreciated her passion and interest in the topic! |
| Ishaan Lal |
| Though Christine is obviously multi-faceted, the one quality that stood out to me the most was how encouraging she is. Whenever any of our group members expressed a wish or desire to do something, Christine was always encouraging us to try it out. She would always help us talk through our reasoning and provide additional reasoning of why we should carry out our wishes. I think her positive and encouraging personality proved to be incredibly beneficial in a class like Grit Lab, because it made all of us be much more introspective as to who we were and what we wanted to do. On top of all of that, Christine is an extra considerate person and would always check in during our team meetings to see if we were all doing well.
Christine did a really fun discovery project on art, particularly digital art in the realm of animation, UI/UX, etc. It was evident that some of the media she came across, like Shaddy Sahmali’s lecture about art in a game and the book “The Design of Everyday Things” were helpful for getting Christine on the right footing. But her conversations with other people including her friends were what was most interesting to hear about. She ended up connecting with a lot of people about the topic of art, and going into really deep discussions about what art actually meant to them. It was cool to hear about how her path of learning and practicing art somewhat deviated into learning about how art affects people around her. Finally, I was very excited to see Christine “pay it forward” by completing her own portfolio website, and by planning an art fair for her club!
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| Alivia Jiang |
| Christine was a late addition to our team, joining a couple classes in, and I could not be more grateful to have been the lucky group to welcome her. A student with a ton of interdisciplinary interests, Christine has a bright personality and never fails to make everyone feel welcomed. Along those lines, my favorite thing about getting to know Christine over these last couple weeks has been the way that she acts as such an empathetic team member. I believe that her strongest asset is that she is such an active listener, possessing the rare trait of being able to actually listen to others rather than just waiting for the chance to add her thoughts. This has been crucial in our team discussions and beyond, because I know that every time I might be scared of sharing something a little more vulnerable with the group, Christine creates an open environment that makes me and every participant in the group feel very supported.
Christine’s project connected both her academic and personal interests by exploring the field of UI/UX design. I learned a lot from her approach to this project, especially how she engaged both Penn students to learn more from them through her exploration conversations, but also managed to plan a large event to also give other students outside the realm of design the opportunity to engage as well. My favorite part of the project by far was how she created a tangible portfolio site to showcase her own works. While oftentimes more academically oriented projects could focus only on diving deep into the subject matter, this very tangible product from her project will definitely be an asset she can engage professionally in the future. I hope to visit this art fair and see how far her hard work has gotten her! |
We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.